#thematic

What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage around like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A sense of humor.’ Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs. ‘We’re hunting for jokes.’ Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’ ‘Discover what?’ ‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for? ↗

— Hari Kunzru

#mathematical-models #philosophy #theories #dreams

So a) To what extent might human relationship be expressed in mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers? Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these signs are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? ↗

— Julian Barnes

#mathematics #relationship #relationship

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#atheist #exist #gaede #god #mathematical-physics

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves. ↗

— Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

#blair #bush #caves #law #literature

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they're also practicing math. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#band #body #doing #garage #hear

Mathematicians are born, not made. ↗

— Henri Poincare

#made #mathematicians

I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics. ↗

— John Pople

#branches #changed #could #follow #had

The thing I want you especially to understand is this feeling of divine revelation. I feel that this structure was "out there" all along I just couldn't see it. And now I can! This is really what keeps me in the math game-- the chance that I might glimpse some kind of secret underlying truth, some sort of message from the gods. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #art

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality. ↗

— Hermann Weyl

#long #mathematics #reality #still #words

It is the story that matters not just the ending. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #story #art